Earlier Brian Caulfield argues on Forbes that Nokia could kill the netbook, pointing at the company’s flagship device N97, though the convergence of mobile computing and phone is finally coming into existence, it doesn’t seem quite like N97 will kill netbook business for the simple reason that a user need not want to carry his mobile computing device in his pocket.
The latest news is that Finnish Mobile phone manufacturer is actually considering venturing into Netbook business, what makes the news all the more interesting is Nokia is more likely to run it’s mobile operating system Symbian on the netbooks.
“We don’t have to look even for five years from now to see that what we know as a mobile phone and what we know as a PC are in many ways converging,”CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo told broadcaster YLE when questioned about Nokia’s aspirations towards the lap. “We are looking very actively also at this opportunity”.
In another news on WSJ, Hewlett Packard, the largest maker of PCs and a major Windows partner is testing Google’s Android operating system on netbooks. “We want to assess the capability Android may have for the computer and communications industries, and so we are studying it,” said Satjiv Chahil, a vice president of HP’s PC division as quoted on WSJ and reportedly DELL and Taiwan’s Asustek, leading seller of netbooks are also considering making an android version of netbooks.
Google, a company now synonymous with search is already in competition with Microsoft’s Office suite with Google apps and now Google’s efforts pushing Android on to netbooks put’s it in direct competition with Windows. Market research firm NPD group Inc. estimates that Windows comes on more than 90% of new netbooks. While Microsoft earns more than 60% of it’s revenues with Windows. Google which doesn’t charge for android hopes to justify its development effort by driving more Web use from mobile devices.
Mobile-facts, a community-based company has earlier tried porting Android onto Asus EEEPC 1000H and found that apart from initial hitches with network and sound,web browser and music player were running fine and though the Asus screen is approximately 5 times bigger than G1 screen, there was no issue in screen adaptation and Android did the adaptation automatically.
The linux version of netbooks didn’t quite seem to take off yet as they didn’t easily work with popular programs and peripherals like printers and though android could face the same issues if Google puts its resources we probably could see a platform shift.
To me netbooks is the future but android is not. Just because google makes something doesnt mean its suuccessful the momentt its launched. I think it will be ages before google can compete with windows on the OS front!